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How to fix a shadow

HE WAS a man of some accomplishments, but drawing eluded him. So while on honeymoon in Italy in 1833, William Henry Fox Talbot adopted the camera lucida, a tracing device, to help him sketch scenes. “The idea occurred to me,” he later wrote, “how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper.”for New Scientist, 9 April 2016